Even counting vast tracks of agriculture, the technium entails fewer than one percent of the atoms on the Earth’s land surface. Yet the impact which this minute fraction of technological mass and energy has on the planet is in far disproportion to its size. Measured by impact per gram or calorie, there is nothing comparable to things we invent. Technology is the most powerful force in the world.

From the moment Sapiens emerged from Africa to colonize every inhabitable watershed on this planet, their inventions began to alter their environment. Sapien’s hunting tools and techniques had far reaching affects: their technology enabled them to kill off key herbivores (mammoths, giant elk, etc.) whose extinctions altered the ecology of entire grassland biomes forever. Once dominant grazers were eliminated, their absence cascaded through the ecosystem, enabling the rise of new predators, new plant species, and all their competitors and allies, surfacing a modified ecosystem. Thus a few clans of people shifted the destiny of thousands of other species. When Sapiens gained control of fire, this technology further modified the natural terrain on a massive scale. Such a tiny trick — burning grasslands, controlling it with backfires, and summoning flames to cook grains — disrupted vast regions of the continents.

Later the repeated inventions and spread of agriculture around the planet affected not only the surface of the Earth, but its 100 km (60-mile) wide atmosphere as well. Farming disturbed the soil and increased CO2. Some climatologists believe that this early anthropogenic warming, starting 8,000 years ago, kept the next ice age at bay. Widespread adoption of farming disrupted a natural climate cycle which would have ordinarily refrozen the northern most portions of the planet by now. In other words, agriculture made (and still makes) the world safe for more agriculture. Like most complex technologies, agriculture — the integrated system of domesticated crops and animals, irrigation infrastructure and soil management — is self-sustaining and will alter its environment to further its own benefit.

Long before the industrial age, humans were altering the Earth’s climate.

Of course, once humans invented machines that ate concentrated old plants (coal) instead of fresh plants, the mechanical exhalations of CO2 furthered altered the balance of the atmosphere as the number of machines multiplied. The technium bloomed as machines harnessed this source of abundant energy. Petroleum eating machines not only transformed the ease, productivity, and spread of agriculture (accelerating an old trend), machines also drilled for more oil faster (a new trend), accelerating the rate of acceleration. Today the CO2 exhalation of all machines greatly exceeds the exhalation of all animals, and even approaches the volume generated by geological forces. Alan Weisman, writing in the World Without Us, suggest that the modern technium is the geological equivalent to a series of ceaseless volcanoes: “by tapping the [fuels of the] Carboniferous Formation and spewing it up into the sky, we’ve become a volcano that hasn’t stopped erupting since the 1700s.” And this impact is not only global, but extremely persistent: “Among the human-crafted artifacts that will last the longest after we’re gone is our redesigned atmosphere.” Climatologist Tyler Volk estimates that a natural geological cycle — with no technological mitigation — would take 100,000 years to return the agricultural and industrial induced CO2 atmosphere to pre-technium levels.

Each year the technium consumes more than 40 trillion pounds of coal, 1.6 trillion pounds of iron, 200 billion pounds of gypsum, and 1.2 trillion pounds of wheat, just four inputs among thousands of others needed to appease its appetite, and all those totals grow more than 5% per year. On average the technium must process twenty tons of atoms per year to support each man, women and child in the modern world.

The technium gains its immense power not from its scale but from its self-amplifying nature. One breakthrough invention, such as the alphabet, the steam pump, or electricity, can lead to further breakthrough inventions, like books, coal mines, and telephones. These advances in turn lead to other breakthrough inventions, such as libraries, power generators, and the internet. Each step adds further powers while retaining most of the virtues of the previous inventions. Someone has an idea (a spinning wheel!) which can hop to other minds, mutate into a derivative idea (place the spinning wheel beneath a sled to make it easy to haul) which disrupts the prevailing balance, causing a shift. That shift will often suggest another idea to someone else (use a cow to pull the wheeled sled), which in turn produces yet another disturbance, another rebalancing, another shift. Once started the teetering continues for many generations. As one ideas sparks two new ones and two ideas spark four, and four eight, this chain reaction of technology reverberates through the society, always gaining in accumulating energy and ceaseless movement. Efficient machines enable industry to make even more efficient machines. Smart chips assist humans in making even smarter chips. These virtuous circles are like rubbing the genie’s lamp and getting three more wishes for the last wish. Magical self-amplification is a story retold in every domain of technology.

But not all changes induced by technology are magically positive. Industrial scale slavery, like that imposed upon Africa, was enabled by sailing ships which transported captives across oceans, and encouraged by the mechanical cotton gin which could cheaply process the fibers the slaves planted and harvested. Without technology, slavery at this massive scale would have been unknown. Thousands of synthetic persistent toxins have caused mass disruptions of natural cycles in both humans and other species, a huge unwanted downside from small inventions. War is a particularly serious amplifier of the great negative powers brought by technology. Horrific weapons of destruction, capable of inflicting entirely new atrocities upon society, spring directly from the most powerful force in the world.

On the other hand, the remedies and offsets to the negative consequences also stem from this most powerful force. Local ethnic slavery was practiced by most earlier civilizations, and probably in prehistoric times as well, and still continues in sporadic remote areas; it’s overall diminishment globally is due to the technological tools of communication, law, and education. Technologies of detection, and substitution, can remove the routine use of synthetic toxins. The technologies of monitoring, law, treaties, policing, courts, citizen media and economic globalism can temper, dampen, and in the long run diminish the vicious cycles of war.

All change in society can be traced back to the products of our minds. The history of civilization is an ever up-cascading sequence of social organization that we invent. Societies begin as leaderless bands of hunter-gatherers, and over generational time acquire chiefs, put down roots (literally) with farms, land and water rights adjudicated by authorities, hatch cities, and eventually become states and nations. Each step in civilization is characterized by more social organization, more different kinds connections between people (beyond family relations), more webs of interdependence, producing more of what Robert Wright, author of Non Zero, calls “non-zero-sumness,” that is, self-reinforcing mutual benefit. Each emergent organization in the evolution of society serves as a platform for citizens to birth yet more new ways to organize. This self-improving recursive “3-more-wishes” loop goes round and round, amplifying its original force.

The power of cooperation is not new, but this virtuous circle is more than ordinary altruism, because participants are often not consciously cooperating, and may in fact compete, or even be parasitic. A merchant in Athens selling a barrel of raisins is not cooperating with the grower of grapes in Macedonia, or the speculator in Corinth hoarding stock, but the three form a system (an emergent market) that expands all their interests. It’s a win-win condition. This kind of accumulating social organization exhibits an almost mathematical flavor that transcends neighborly kindness. Rather than happy camaraderie, this increasing structure is built on information flows that tighten both trust and rivalries into a web of interdependence. As these links increase, so does the power of amplification and acceleration.

Progress, even moral progress, is ultimately a human invention. It is a product of our wills and minds, and thus a technology. We can decide slavery is not a good idea. We can decide that evenly applied laws, rather than nepotic favoritism, is a good idea. We can outlaw certain punishments with treaties. We can encourage accountability with the invention of writing. We can consciously expand our circle of empathy. These are all inventions and as much products of our minds as light bulbs and telegraphs.

The larger point is that this cyclotron of social betterment is not propelled by ethics or religion, but by technology. Society is evolved by injecting it with incremental doses of that most powerful force in the world; each rise in social organization throughout history is driven by an insertion of a new technology. The invention of writing unleashed the leveling fairness of laws. The invention of standard minted coins made trade more universal, encouraged entrepreneurship, and hastened the idea of liberty. Historian Lynn White notes, “Few inventions have been so simple as the stirrup, but few have had so catalytic an influence on history.” In White’s view the adoption of the foot stirrup for horse saddles enabled riders to use weapons on horseback, which gave an advantage to the cavalry over infantry, and to the lords who could afford horses, and so nurtured the rise of aristocratic feudalism in Europe. The stirrup was not the only technological cause blamed for feudalism. As Karl Marx famously claimed, “The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist.”

Double-entry bookkeeping, invented in 1494 by a Franciscan monk, enabled companies to monitor their cash flow and for the first time steer complex business. Double-entry accounting unleashed the banking industry in Venice, and launched a global economy. The invention of the contraception pill in 1960 aided the blossoming of feminism. The invention of moveable type printing in Europe encouraged Christians to read their religion’s founding text themselves, make their own interpretations, and launched the very idea of “protest” within and against religion. Way back in 1620 Francis Bacon, the godfather of modern science, realized how powerful technology was becoming. He listed three “practical arts” — the printing press, gunpowder, and the magnetic compass — that had changed the world. He declared that “no empire, no sect, no start seems to have exerted greater power and influence in human affairs than these mechanical discoveries.” Bacon help launch the scientific method which accelerated the speed of invention; thereafter society was in constant flux as one conceptual seed after another disrupted social equilibrium.

Seemingly simple inventions like the clock had profound social consequences. The clock divvied up an unbroken stream of time into measurable units, and once it had a face, time became a tyrant, ordering our lives. Danny Hillis, computer scientist, believes the gears of the clock spun out science, and all it’s many cultural descendents. He says, “The mechanism of the clock gave us a metaphor for self-governed operation of natural law. (The computer, with its mechanistic playing out of predetermined rules, is the direct descendant of the clock.) Once we were able to imagine the solar system as a clockwork automaton, the generalization to other aspects of nature was almost inevitable, and the process of Science began.”

It’s never a good idea to assign a single cause to any large scale cultural change. The greater the number of people a change effects the more likely numerous factors are behind it. A web of complex conditions must converge to produce the hallmark transitions in a complex society. But when we trace back the origins for each agent in a field of causes, we find that each strand leads to a newly introduced technology, a new idea.

That means that new technologies today will cast a long shadow into the future and shape the lives of our descendents. The technologies of ultrasound fetal inspection and routine abortion enabled sexual selection of children so that now males outnumber females in the youth of China and India. This imbalance will leave an immense surplus of unmarried males in society, an excess which in the past has been a source of unrest, crime, and war. Still young, their story has not fully played out yet, but because of the sheer numbers involved (hundreds of millions in Asia) its concluding effect will be global. Whatever the consequences of this sex-ratio excess are — an increase in international prostitution, a surge of ambitious entrepreneurs and military recruits, or a massive outward migration to places like Africa — the effects will be broader, and less technological that what might be expected from the invention of ultrasound equipment.

Name a disruption in culture today, either positive or negative, and if you press far enough back you’ll find an tangible invention that sets off the imbalance. Globalism? Cheap, ubiquitous global communications. Social Security overhang? Medical advances for increasing longevity and decreasing fertility. Obesity epidemic? Cheap monoculture food system combined with passive entertainment technology. Gay rights? Emboldened by science showing gender preferences are biological. Celebrity obsessions? Broadcast media. Militant jihadism? Islam has been around 1500 years. But an imbalance between a medically enabled population explosion without a corresponding explosion in economic or political progress disrupts the former social equilibrium.

Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace both realized from reading Malthus’s work on population that natural selection is propelled by the difference between two growth patterns in the wild: population versus food. The greater propulsion of population growth could not be contained in the lesser geometric gains of its food production. This tension between the overwhelming multiplication of population and the slower expansion of its material container is the drive behind evolution.

The evolution of the technium likewise gains its unmatched power from the difference between two growth rates. The number of ideas and their transmission via computers, books, telephone lines, patents, and so on increases in an exponential fashion. Information is, in fact, the fastest growing thing on this planet. Information is especially conducive to amplification and compounding. As the number of facts increase, the connections between facts increases exponentially faster. Because the mathematical law of combinations, the number of links between pages explodes faster than the number of pages increases. New inventions in certain fields like communication, which are powered by increasing combinations of connections, can increase the speed of invention overall, revving the engines of creation. Everywhere we look, the technium is wired with self-amplifying loops ballooning up the scale of change. Fundamentally, discoveries in the science of how to discover, and inventions in how to invent (the genie process we call science) accelerate the rate of discovery and invention everywhere.

But our human ability to absorb or process this explosion of ideas increases only linearly at best. Despite years spent in education, or bathed in the best nutrition, our brains are not doubling in speed, memory, and insight every 18 months, as computers do. In fact, biologically speaking, our brains are remarkably similar to the brains of the first Sapiens 50,000 years ago. The smartest humans are not exponentially smarter than the average ones, and the average IQ of a human is only slowly increasing over time by the most minute amount (a few percent per decade in modern times). Even collectively, unaided human intelligence is only growing in tandem with the number of humans. The gap between the escalating growth of information generated by us and our machines, and our tiny marginal improvements in being able to understand the oceans of information and make meaning from it is the driver behind the rapid evolution of the technium.

The work of understanding all this information is migrating from humans to the technium. We can no longer keep up with our own creations, and so we are constructing an apparatus to structure what we think, in the same manner that we first used writing on paper to extend our memory. Now we are offloading other mental functions. The technium contains an elaborate knowledge processing system consisting of encyclopedias, classification indexes, cross references, search engines, footnotes, citations, hypertext, and the web. These technologies organize the output of our collective minds — both intangible ideas and tangible inventions — into a semantic structure, much like an ecosystem. This incredibly complicated mesh of connections, interdependencies, associations, and emergent structure gives the technium a “meaning” that is outside our of understanding.

It’s reasonable to figure that since the technium is simply “that which the mind produces” then at its root the most powerful force in the world must not be technology but the human mind. If this were so we’d have to recalibrate the equation above to state that the origin of all change in our lives lays in the mysterious force of intelligence and consciousness hiding between our ears. (That assertion reminds me of a joke I heard from a friend who said “whenever I get the idea that human mind is the most powerful thing in world I just remember what it is that is telling me this.”) But the claim that the human mind is foremost power is not valid. No matter how much we use our biological mind’s awareness to reflect upon our mind’s workings, this type of mental introspection and self-improvement leads to extremely limited improvement at best, and usually none at all. Contemplation (even in a zen position) to optimize our own mind just doesn’t scale up. Unaided, the mind makes very little headway in amplifying itself.

However, the technium, which is a product of our brain, can alter the circuits that produced it. People who grow up immersed in the technologies of writing and reading think differently. I don’t mean humans think differently while reading. Reading and writing are cognitive tools that, once acquired, change the way in which the brain memorizes facts and conceptualizes ideas, and these changes stimulate abstract thinking. When psychologists use neuroimaging technology, like MRI, to compare the brains of literates and illiterates working on a task, they find many differences in how their brains work whether or not they are reading. Researcher Alexandre Castro-Caldas discovered that processing between the hemispheres of the brain was different between those who could read and those who could not. A key part of the corpus callosum was thicker in literates, and “the occipital lobe processed information more slowly in individuals who learned to read as adults compared to those who learned at the usual age.” Psychologists Ostrosky-Solis, Garcia and Perez tested literates and illiterates with a battery of cognitive tests while measuring their brain waves and concluded that “the acquisition of reading and writing skills has changed the brain organization of cognitive activity in general… not only in language but also in visual perception, logical reasoning, remembering strategies, and formal operational thinking.” Literacy — a human invention — rewires the human mind.

It is not just writing. Music, another invention, also alters the brain in a sustainable way. Many studies have shown how listening to music strengthens the communication wiring between brain hemispheres. Beside fostering an expected growth in auditory regions of the brain, regularly playing musical instruments significantly strengthens the thickness of the corpus callosum fibers and activates the cerebral cortex. Our mind makes a drum and flute, and the drum and flute remakes our mind.

Certainly, other tools that we devote lots of attention to should also alter our brain to a similar degree. How could a brain which spends 7 hours per day (!!) watching the fine flickering lines of television not find its perception circuits permanently rewired? The average adult American spends one hour per day driving a car. Cruising through terrain at 60 mph is not a skill the Sapien brain was evolved for. So the technology of the automobile must reshape our plastic brains, too.

Now we have the net. While some alarmists claim that Google is making us stupid, in fact Google is making us smarter by again retraining our brains. In a 2009 study Gary Small used MRI scans to demonstrate that sustained internet searching among older adults bestowed their brains with a two-fold increase in activation in several major brain regions compared to non-internet users. Experience web surfers had a significant increase in activity in controlling decision making, complex reasoning, and vision, including the frontal pole, anterior temporal region, and the hippocampus regions of the brain.

Progress of any type, especially literacies such as reading and writing, or web surfing, are not inherited in our genes (so far), nor re-invented each generation. Rather literacies are carried forwarded by the technium. Whatever progress there is in the world, is passed down generationally via the mechanism of our culture. Whatever changes that literacies ignite in the human brain must be carried forward not in our genes, but in the continuum of technium. This gives the technium incredible power. We don’t quite appreciate it yet, but our child, technology, is more powerful than we its parents are.

Technology may not only be the most powerful force in the world; it may the most powerful force in the universe. If an embryonic amount of technology can so affect a planet, unintentionally, the same force applied intentionally several centuries from now could be aimed a star, and with time, at a galaxy. The libraries of science fiction are filled with plausible schemes by which advanced civilizations terraform planets, tame stars into generators, reroute stellar orbits, and re-arrange matter and energy on astronomical scales. Vast space colonies, death stars, ring worlds, and Dyson Spheres are some of the imagined projects that indicate the cosmic power of technology. If these ambitions are at all possible, they would be direct extensions of the same compounding circuits operating in the technium today. To manage these galactic-scale manipulations, our minds would have to amplify themselves by creating artificial minds smarter than us, just as we have amplified our bodies by creating artificial machines stronger than us, machines such as cranes, trucks, and robot arms. A technium populated with machines capable of their own indefinite upcreation could keep progressing way beyond our current understanding. This complex system would invent a system superior to itself in an infinite loop until the whole cycle reached its natural limits (which all real things have). Many believe that a technium like this is already operating at galactic scale somewhere else in the universe; this speculation is to only point out the technium is not solely an Earth-bound, human phenomenon.

Technology is that which is produced by a mind — any mind: animal, machine or alien. When we created the technology of writing, we gladly extended our memory onto paper, making ourselves smarter. But in turn the alphabets we invented changed how our minds worked. Because our inventions can reach back into our brains, and essentially transform our minds into another one of our inventions, our inventions are more powerful than our minds. In this way technology can circle back into its origins, becoming its own child.

The force of this uroborous is incomparable. There is no nuclear energy, fusion, plasma bolt, black hole, white dwarf, cosmic nebula anywhere in the universe that can uplift itself in the way that technology can. For certain there will be further evolutions of the technium. The great story that begins with the big bang and bootstraps itself up into persistent evolving systems that keep building up more complex systems will certainly keep going. First persistently dynamic planets hatch life, which uplifts itself to make minds, which then uplifts itself to make technology. Technology will uplift itself to create the next level of extropy. But it will continue the same arc. The same big history. Whatever technology evolves into, it will carry on in the direction it has been headed so far for the past 14 billion years: towards greater complexity, diversity, specialization, ubiquity, socialization, consilience, energy density, and sentience. A future meta-technology will be unrecognizable on its face, but fundamentally continue these trends.

As far as we can see, for at least a hundred light years in all directions, there appears to be only the bleak unbending forces of physics at work: radiation, heat, gravity, momentum, and always, entropy. But we are lucky. We live on a membrane of floating sphere that is infected with a rampant case of the most powerful force in the universe, a force that is curiously more potent that the immense powers governing the stars around us. Unlike the eternal constancy delivered by the universal laws, this most powerful force is in constant change. The technium is in fact, changing the nature of change, an ongoing process of becoming, and we are, to a statistical approximation, right in the middle of it.

As a biological species born of life, we embrace our origins in life. And as a thinking species, we embrace our mindfulness. But now in the middle of this long evolution it has become clear that we are a technological species as well. Our self image says that we are a thinking animal that reluctantly produces the most powerful force in the world. That is true. But actually something more wondrous is going on. In reality we human beings are the product of the most powerful force in the universe. We are technology. The self-manufactured uroborous.

I am continually amazed by the breadth and depth of your abstractions, besides the simplicity and logic with which you write. Many thanks for sharing them with us. You have truly added an incredible perspective to the way I look at the world.

I had a question:

The eastern religions, through meditation, have always looked inward and reached similar conclusions. They also believe that nothing is permanent, especially w.r.t. mind and anything connected with it. And this “technology” uses the mind to tame the mind. It is directly recursive.

Have you thought about this side of the technology as well? The one that looks inside and not outside.

Court Merrigan

One that leaps out to me is “ocher pigment”, because there is the possibility that it could occur in nature, without being produced? But I’m not sure if that’s how you mean it.

Other than that, they all seem to be technology, in form or another.

But take “legal rights.” Clearly these are an invention of the human mind, but are we then to equate legal rights with all the items in your list, as well as every other human invention, in the same broad category? How is this then descriptive?

This seems to me similar to the idea that “all is nature, nature is all.” This is a useful idea against those who would say that human somehow stand apart from nature, when in fact we are just one aspect of it. Are you then saying, then, that there is no separation between humans and technology? Or, if there is a separation, in what does it consist? Are humans a mere form of technology?

@Court: There is not a single graph or illustration in OoC. It’s all text.

Stefan Sojka

Perhaps all of life – and all the technologies – are manifestations of aberrations within the ultimate technology – the universe itself. What are atoms, if not technology perfected? Our technium is a loud bang right now for us in human time scale, but on any universal or subatomic scale, it is not so great (though it could be). For billions of years, natural nano technology has toiled away unconsciously perfecting life on our human scale. Our cells don’t even know they are part of a civilization that thinks its a human, or a rabbit, or a fly. They don’t even know they share a unique DNA sequence, or that the giant being can see, or hear, or surf the net.

One model of these giant 100-billion strong cellular nations (human) starts discovering technology, but can’t control it. It’s grabbed the firehose half way down and its flailing every which way. Unless we grok that we are expressions of the far more refined and technically advanced process of cellular networking, our technium may fizzle out very rapidly. It is time for us to embrace nature’s approach and operate sustainably, using every new technological advance to improve efficiency, conserve energy and perfect design. Some of these exponential curves have got to start flattening out! Technology that consumes its world unsustainably, is like a cancer: Living it up and expanding uncontrollably, without acknowledging the being within which it lives.

TN

@Stefan

In my opinion one of the merits of Kevin’s great article was his decision to keep any ideology or ‘message’ out of it and merely reflect upon the phenomenology of technology instead, which is indeed awe-inspiring enough.

I personally am tired of reading about ‘sustainablity’ or whichever other buzzword ideology currently saves the day. I also can’t stand the sentimental picture of nature as a pure and innocent ‘being’ which ‘perfected’ itself throughout its existence without any rupture or discontinuity (the dinosaurs would kindly disagree with such lofty a portrait of Mother Nature), and most of all I despise the liking of us humans to a cancer, because as an ultimate consequence — and given the right powers at the right time — such a notion can call for nothing less than our annihilation.

Miguel Juan

In my opinion, you are the kind of philosopher that is worth being: you try to explain the most important things with a global approach, resorting only to your mind. I think success is very difficult to obtain with such an ambitious objective but, the outcome of the process will be worth the effort.

Clem Weidenbenner

@TN
Whoa.. time for a little decaf. But just a little – I agree with you in many ways. That said, I’ll bother to point out some disagreements.

In my opinion, Kevin does have a ‘message’ in his articles. But having a message adds value to them.

Buzzwords do tend to be abused. As shorthand for a concept or argument they go a long way to speed up a conversation. I happen to like cliches for the same reason – so long as the word (phrase)tansmits real content in an efficient manner. In time though it seems too many folks become enamoured of the buzzword and play it for an emotional appeal. At which point it is time to pinch the nose. But the concept beneath ‘sustainability’ – which to me is a set of deliberate human behaviors to keep our nest in order so that we can enjoy a quality of life and allow those coming behind us to enjoy some as well – this isn’t such a bad thing.

For all of Nature’s granduer there are some pretty ‘ugly’ aspects that have nothing to do with us directly. Disease comes to mind. Even without humans in the photo – there are diseases that kill cute little critters (cue some tears). But beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and if there weren’t diseases and foxes eating cute little bunnies then evolution would stop working. So on the sentimental view of Nature we agree.

Perhaps my biggest disagreement comes in your trashing the notion that we bear no resemblance to cancer. Perhaps this is due to a nearly universal view that cancer is ugly. We get the notion that cancer is ugly because it hurts those we love and is really quite accomplished in doing so. We can take out polio, soften the common cold, and fix a broken bone. But cancer still gives us greif and scares us something silly. So its ugly. Those who want to describe the filth of human polution as a cancer to the earth are playing on this ugliness. But the careless disregard for our planet (our nest) that wanton polution begets is actually worse than cancer. Ugly as it may be, cancer teaches us quite a bit about how cells work (or fail to work). Polution is just sloth on a grand scale. Ugly to an extreme. But the cure for polution isn’t erradicating humans (here we agree again). We need to clean it up. And then we need to learn to live in a sustainable (er – how about responsible??) way. And we can invent the technology to do this. The Technium might then be proud.

Stefan Sojka

@TN
Thanks for your response. Two points

1) Regardless of the overuse of the word “sustainability” these days, in the context I was using it, I feel it is fair. There is actually no alternative to sustainability – if it is not sustainable, it’s all over, for us.
2) I don’t know where you got the idea of eradicating humanity from – sounds pretty radical! I spoke about flattening exponential curves, getting in control of technology to enable efficiency and perfect design. To use the cancer analogy, it is possible to go into remission – which was my point. Cancer is molecular technology driven by the wrong rules. We live on a planet where technology is driven and developed by a set of rules that are not yet fine tuned enough to be ‘sustainable’. Nature is not ‘perfect’ in the way it impacts our lives, for sure, but the technology of nature is pretty amazing – it includes the physical world in which we live, but it also includes the “technium” and the space of ideas. We need to become benign so as to retain a position within this space.

@ Clem – good post…

eddie

Agreed that KK has done an upstanding job to tackle this topic. Kudos.

Even though the technium is a small percentage of the total matter, it is potent. (From my personal experiences) There are resistance, by those “sentients beings” that controls emotions and “messages”, against the technium. Some times those resistance are in the form of financial considerations, privacy considerations, security considerations, “face” (IMHO, especially here in Asia) considerations, “power” (as a history of being able to assert strength/edge) considerations etc.

Will these considerations shift/control(/balance?) the technium movements?

Can’t wait for more interesting essays this late Aug.

Danny Bloom

Great post, great ideas. One thing that also needs to be studied. I am convinced that reading on paper (“reading”) is so very different from reading on screens (“screening”, or as Marvin Minsky at the MIT Media Lab likes to call it, “screen-reading”) both mentally and emotionally, and not a prioro better or worse, just different, as Paul Saffo has said, that we need to study these differences in terms of which parts of the brain light up and in what different kinds of ways when we read on paper and when we “screen” online or on a Kindle. I would love to see Gary Small use MRI scans to study how sustained reading on paper and sustained screening on a screen differ in terms of brain chemisty and what this might mean for the future of the technium. I am sure the frontal pole, anterior temporal region, and the hippocampus regions of the brain are impacted very very differently when we read on paper from when we screen-read on screens. We need to study this. Anne Mangen in Norway and Maryanne Wolf at Tufts have already dipped their toes into the water here. Read them. Gary Small, study THIS!

Note Kevin Kelly or his editor here: upon reading this essay above very slowly at street corner in southern Taiwan while sipping on a nice can of cold Taiwan Beer, I chanced upon a few minor but important TYPOs and ATOMIC Typos in this blog post, seven in all…. do you want me to send them to you by email or post them as a comments or ….FORGETABOUTIT? (They are minor, but for future readers, it might be useful to plug the corrections in. I wasn’t looking for them, I was just really enjoying reading the post on paper — I HATE SCREENS! — I had to print it out my the copier at the local Kinko’s in order to read it properly — but they just popped out at me as I was reading outside during rush hour traffic around 6 pm here. Do they matter? Sure. Are they important typos? No, nobody will even notice. I didn’t even notice the first time through, it was upon second reading with pen and paper and underlining and circling words and annotations in the margin that I saw them. Want to see them?

@Dan Bloom: These postings have not been edited. They are first drafts, like most blogs. They will be edited and proofed by a real editor if they make it into my book. But thanks for the offer anyway.

Marvin Minsky

Fascinating discussion throughout. About the growing accumulation of knowledge (as in ” . . . encyclopedias, classification indexes, cross references, search engines, footnotes, citations, hypertext . . .”); we also ought to recognize the importance of the much smaller accumulation of great abstract ideas — as when Newton’s three laws compressed vast bodies of previous factual knowledge about mechanics, or when Pauling (and others) replaced so much of chemical knowledge by a few new ideas about the nature of chemical bonds.

Um, I do not (as Dan Bloom likes to suggest) “like to use the term ‘screen-reading'”: I only suggested that he use it himself.
In any case, I’ve come to greatly prefer reading *important” texts on screens — mainly because one can quickly search a text and also install useful hyperlinks to my other files.

As for typos, my MSword can catch a lot of them as I type — but I usually turn that feature off. I’ll re-activate some later day, when we develop a better semantics-corrector.

@Marvin Minsky: Yes, the compression of knowledge is indeed another aspect of the most powerful force. I should have mentioned that.

Danny Bloom

Hello Kevin, I figured this is just first draft and maybe used later in yr book, and meant my offer not at all as criticism but merely as helpfulness if helpfulness is useful here. I will send the very very minor minor typos and atomic typos to your office, offline here, and you can save them for your files. Again, no criticism meant at all: I am the world’s worst typist myself, hunt and peck two fingers, and I wasn’t even looking for typos. They popped out at me on second reading on PAPER print outs at leisure. They are so minor they are not even important. And I am sure you saw them yourself. My hobby is proofreader to the stars. Volunteer work.

And to Dr Minsky, my bad, sorry: re — “Um, I do not (as Dan Bloom likes to suggest) â€œlike to use the term â€˜screen-readingâ€™â€: I only suggested that he use it himself.”

I apologize to the good Dr Minsky. He is right, of course, and I erred in suggesting he liked to use the term “screen-reading” for what we do when we read online. He merely, and very graciously, wrote to me after I queried him about this topic, and said while he liked my idea of the word “screening” for this, he felt it was rather vague and had too many earlier meanings, and was not such a good word, and he suggested that I might want to use “screen-reading” instead. So he is right, and I am glad he corrected me above.

By the way, what’s an “atomic typo”? It’s a very interesting “new” term…

jim

when you started talking about CO2 i thought it was going to be yet another anti-humanist ‘cull the population for gaia’ rant but by the end all was forgiven and you had me optimistically traveling through the space-time continuum like when you get to the good bit in ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ …nice piece of writing!

haig

Great post, but it further reiterates upon an issue that I’ve been confused over in your conceptions of the technium. You state that the technium is “that which the mind produces”. You seem to be defining the technium as just technology, but then when you discuss your conclusions and actually your entire thesis in this book you implicitly take the more natural (IMHO) definition of the technium as the sphere encompassing both technology and the minds which create and tend to its evolution. You state that technology is more powerful than the minds from whence it originated, but also acknowledge that technology wraps itself back around to increase the power of those minds, which allow further increases in technology. I see the point you are trying to make in this post that such recursive improvements to cognition from technology does not scale as the technology itself does, but you might be prematurely dismissing the convergence of us minds with our technology, or if you aren’t you seem to downplay this eventuality.

So then once we merge with technology, what is the technology and what is mind, and then what is it that the technium defines?

Stewart Brand

Worth setting to music.

Andreas

Your blog is one of the best I’ve ever stumbled upon. You eloquently describe the bigger picture and inspire with your abstract thinking and complex reasoning.

Releasing such well written essays and soliciting feedback as you work on your book is a groundbreaking way of connecting with your audience, creating public interest and elevate quality.

Well done sir, I can’t wait for your book!

Alex Tolley

I think some of your ideas are misplaced. Unbalanced sex ratios in India and China are not necessarily due to medical technologies, just the age old practice of infanticide.

Radical Islam is not some recent development, it plagued the British in North Africa in the C19th.

Slavery on various scales has been with us a long time, and it didn’t take technology to do it. The extent of slavery was simply the reach of each slave owning empire. Ending slavery, first in England, was not a technological spin-off but rather a moral one that required the efforts of a dedicated group.

Finally, while it is true that so far we have no biological data on extra solar planets, we may the first indications of life based on spectroscopic data well within 20 years.

Robert L

On the demonization of CO2… the planet started with a CO2 atmosphere, probably similar to Titan or Venus. The development of photosynthesis and consequent extraction of carbon reduced the atmospheric C02 down to the minuscule levels we see today. Those limestone cliffs are the result of eons of “life”. Recent pre-industrial levels (according to most sources) were around 0.25% and have grown in the last 200 years to 0.35%. We may be producing more CO2 than the geological forces, but these are trivially small values.

Court Merrigan

Would you care to expand on the notion that all inventions of the mind, including ethics and religion, and so forth, are technology? I’m having trouble wrapping my mind around this definition. And doesn’t a definition spread so widely risk becoming a nondescriptive tautology?

@Court Merrigan: If you think God only exists in people’s mind, then it is a technology. If God exists out of people’s mind, he is not. Definitions are tricky. Maybe you can help. Which of the following is NOT a technology?

On “information,” you might want to check out Stephen Meyer’s 2009 book, The Signature in the Cell, which purports to demonstrate scientifically that what Meyer calls “specified information” (i.e., information is not random; it’s designed to DO specific things in the cell) DOES NOT arise “spontaneously” in the cell–or, by extension, in the world.

It’s an argument for intelligent design–one that anyone opposed to it should read carefully.

I’ve often thought that, logically, no experiment designed by a human intelligence can demonstrate the existence of a supposedly random occurrence (e.g., the emergence of life). Meyer delves deep into probability theory and the biochemistry of the cell.

Mike Saunders

As a person that has studied the effect of technology for decades ( I base a graduate paper on Lynn White’s work), I think that this is one of the best essays on the subject that I have read in a very long time. You are a joy to read, keep at it.